What Are Animal Text Art?
Animal text art is a small drawing of an animal made from typed characters and spread across several lines. A cat is a slash, an underscore and a backslash for ears, a pair of brackets for the face and a caret for the mouth; a whale is a curve of slashes above a row of tildes for the sea. Every stroke is a Unicode character, which makes each piece plain text rather than a font or an image: you can copy it, paste it into a chat and edit it afterwards. Older pieces such as the classic cat and the striped fish stick to ASCII, the basic keyboard characters, while newer ones borrow the bear nose ᴥ, the box-drawing bars in the bunny's sign and the overline ‾ that forms the puppy's paws.
Unlike a one-line face, a multi-line animal depends on two things holding true after you paste it. The line breaks must survive, and every line must be measured in characters of the same width, which is what a monospace font like the one in a code editor provides. Most chat apps show messages in a proportional font, where a full stop is narrow and an m is wide, so the second line of a cat can slide sideways relative to the first. The pieces on this page were chosen to be forgiving: they are short, mostly under twenty characters wide, and they favour characters whose widths stay close to each other even in ordinary fonts.
One limit to be upfront about: a screen reader does not see a cat, a dog or a bee. It reads slashes and parentheses aloud one by one, or skips them, so a blind friend hears noise where you meant a picture. Write the animal's name or your message in words next to the art whenever the message matters.
Why Use Animal Text Art?
A cat drawn in characters is a small gift. It takes a second longer to read than an emoji, and the person on the other end knows it was chosen rather than tapped. That makes animal text art a natural fit for goodnight messages (the sleeping cat with its z's), for cheering someone up (the bunny with a cookie) and for the kind of low-stakes silliness that keeps a group chat alive.
Animals are the most shared subject in text art because they are easy to recognise at tiny sizes. Two pointed ears say "cat" even when the rest of the face is three characters, a pair of tall parentheses above a face says "rabbit", and a ᴥ nose says "bear" or "dog". That is why the bunny holding a sign became a template that people rewrite with their own words, and why ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ, the bear reaching for a hug, ends up under so many supportive comments.
Practicality counts too. A text animal can go into a Discord welcome channel, a Reddit comment or a WhatsApp group description without uploading anything, and other people can copy it, alter it and reply in kind. If you only need the face without the body, the animal emoticons page has single-line bears, cats and dogs, and the kaomoji collection covers expressive human faces built the same way.
Where Can You Use Animal Text Art?
Multi-line art needs its line breaks kept and, ideally, a monospace display. This is how the common places treated it at the time of writing; apps change, so send a test to yourself first.
- Discord: the best home for these. Put the animal between two lines of three backticks and Discord shows it in monospace with Markdown switched off, so the backslash ears of the classic cat and the octopus's legs stay where they belong. Outside a code block the backslashes can be eaten as escape characters.
- Reddit: in the Markdown editor, indent every line by four spaces or use a fenced code block; otherwise single line breaks are merged and your cat becomes one long line. The rich text editor has a code block button that does the same job.
- WhatsApp: line breaks survive in messages. Wrapping the whole piece in three backticks switches it to a monospace font in most versions, which keeps the whale's spout above the whale.
- iMessage: line breaks are kept but there is no monospace mode, so choose the narrow pieces such as the surprised cat or the sleepy bunny, and expect the wider ones to lean a little.
- Twitter/X: posts keep line breaks and count each one as a character; the font is proportional and leading spaces may be trimmed. Short pieces like the flock of birds are the safest.
- Instagram: a bio keeps line breaks on most versions of the app but collapses runs of spaces, so any animal that relies on leading spaces caves in. Captions behave a little better but still trim leading blanks. Use one-line animals there.
When a platform strips leading spaces, one workaround is to begin each line with a character that looks empty, such as the Braille blank U+2800, or with a full stop that becomes part of the drawing.
How to Copy and Paste Animal Text Art
- Pick the creature that suits the message: cats and dogs for everyday replies, the bunny with a sign when you want to write your own words, fish and whales for someone who loves the sea.
- Hit Copy on the card. Every line break comes along with the characters, so there is nothing to reassemble on your side.
- Paste it where it is going. On Discord, Reddit or WhatsApp, type three backticks on the line before and the line after so the app keeps the columns aligned.
Tips for Using Animal Text Art
Test in a draft first
Send the animal to yourself or into a private channel before sharing it. If the ears drift, try a code block, a narrower piece, or a different font setting in the app.
Rewrite the sign
The bunny holding a sign has a box with room for about ten characters. Replace "hop hop!" with a name or "good luck" and keep the length the same, so the box edges still line up.
Backslashes are load-bearing
Slashes make ears, whiskers, legs and fins. Markdown treats a backslash before punctuation as an escape, so outside a code block on Discord or Reddit the classic cat can lose an ear. A code block protects every character.
Mind the mixed characters
Pieces like the sitting dog mix Japanese punctuation such as 〵 and じ with ordinary letters. They look right in most modern fonts but can go lopsided in an older one, so keep the pure ASCII cat or the teddy bear as a fallback.
Give it a caption
A stretching cat with "monday mood" under it says more than the cat alone, and it gives anyone who cannot see the picture something to read.